REQUESTING HELP WITH CAN / COULD

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the Daily Vitamin. I hope your day is going well so far.

For the rest of the week, we are going to look at other ways to ask for (pedir), or request, help.

Today we will look at some phrases for requesting help politely.

CAN / COULD
The modal verbs CAN and COULD are often used to request something (for example, to request help). COULD is a little more polite than CAN. We use the verbs CAN and COULD with another verb in the bare infinitive form (without TO).

To make a question, use this formula: CAN / COULD subject bare infinitive verb

Example 1:
A: Can you tell me how to use this machine?
B: Yes. It's easy.

Example 2:
A: Could you show me where the staff room is?
B: Of course. I'm going there now. You can follow me.

Tomorrow we will look at some more details for requesting help.

If you have any questions about this Daily Vitamin, you can ask us for help by posting your question to one of our social media sites (Facebook or Bluesky). Or, alternatively, you could create your own sentence with CAN / COULD and post your sentence to our social media sites. As always, we will give you feedback about your writing as soon as possible.

Enjoy the rest of your day!